Le Collège Cévenol, Part 2

Here I am standing in front of the old Internat des Filles (girls' dormitory) at the Collège. This was the site of many dramas which can only be created by 12–14 year old girls .... It was a difficult time for me. Right now I am focusing on remembering the good parts: learning French; the food, which for a boarding school was very good; walking down the hill to the village; studying and doing well in school; the walks in the surrounding forest...

Diary, 20 October 1964
I love Goûter [afternoon tea]... Hot tea, bread, chocolate ... 

Diary entry, 8 February 1965
This week [my marks are] History, 16; 20, Maths; Grammar 18 ... This means History 80%, Math 100, Grammar 90 ...

We managed to get inside the building; it was open because construction workers were working behind the building, luckily not in the wing where I lived. However, the place was a shambles inside.

What remains of one of the bedrooms. We saw evidence of workers probably living in some of the bedrooms of the dorm. From the photo though, you can see how narrow our little beds were. Wonderful French windows: we used to have them wide open in good weather and sit on the windowsill.

We ate and had study hall in this room. One lone round wooden table with yellow Formica-type top remained. Very sad to see such a mess.

The salon, the other half of the dining room (behind the accordion doors). Everything looks WAY smaller than it did when I was at school there.

The only thing that looks exactly the same as in 1965 was the staircase from the entry hall to the first floor where my dorm room was. Sometimes my job was cleaning the stairs ...

Diary entry, 4 February 1965:

I could kill the femme de ménage (cleaning woman or housekeeper).  ... This morning she accused me of not having done the stairs. I hadn't known I was supposed to, [along] with my other [job]. I said it wasn't my fault ... I gave her a dirty look as I swept. She said in French, "Don't give me that dirty look." And I was sweeping off the stairs and she said "Don't sweep off the stairs, c'est pas toi qui fais les mûrs [it's not you who does the walls]." J'ai dit, "je ne touche pas les mûrs" [I'm not touching the walls] or something to that effect. She replied, "Sweep properly or j'appelerai la directrice," (Madame de Latour who was the head of the dorm, who was very scary).

Typical twelve year old rebelliousness ...

View from the staircase landing of the library and lunch building (Le Luquet).

The campus has a sad feeling of ghosts floating about the area. Everything gone to wrack and ruin.

The saddest thing is that there was a murder here in 2011, one student murdered another, and it signaled the death knell of the school. So ironic that a school that was founded on pacifism (more on that in next post) would be the scene of such a horrific act and that it would spell the demise of the place.